The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (7 page)

Milty led the boys into the garden. The five of them sat down on the swing and Duddy told them a story about his brother Bradley. “The poor jerk. Jeez. I got a letter from him only yesterday aft and he’s going to try and escape. Otherwise he’d have to stay in the Foreign Legion for another two years, you know.”

“No kidding?”

“If he makes it he’s going to come back here for me. He’s going to take me to South America. We’re going to get a yacht. I mean all he has to do once he’s out is dig up that buried money and –”

“How could he write you he’s going to try and escape?” Milty asked. “Don’t they read his mail? My father told me that in the army letters –”

“You poor stupid jerkhead. Haven’t you ever heard of invisible ink? Hey,” Duddy said, jumping up,

“what’s wrong with the tulips?”

“What do you mean what’s wrong with the tulips?”

“Why, they’re closed.” Duddy looked horrified.

“So what?”

“Tulips should be opened,” Duddy said.

“Should they?”

“Hey, what kind of a stupid jerk are you anyway? Ask Bobby.”

“Sure they should be opened.”

Duddy bent down to pluck a tulip.

“Don’t touch anything.”

“I just wanted to show you.”

Milty hesitated. “All right,” he said. “But only one. Promise?”

“On my word of honor.” Duddy picked up a tulip and opened it carefully. “There,” he said, “doesn’t that look better?”

“Wow.”

“How beautiful.”

Even Milty had to admit that the tulip looked better opened and, as a nice surprise for his mother, he helped Duddy and the others open every tulip in the garden.

“My mommy will be home soon,” Milty said. “She’ll give us milk and apple pie.”

“Naw,” Duddy said. “I think we’d better go. See you.”

Duddy Kravitz’s Warriors operated in wartime and many of their activities were colored by the conflagration in Europe. Take their tussle with the
CPC
, for instance.

What with so many able-bodied young men already stationed overseas in 1943, Montreal, the world’s largest inland seaport, seemed to invite enemy attack. The Nips and even the hated Huns, it’s true, were some distance away, but remembering Pearl Harbor, the city played it safe. Older citizens, those who couldn’t fight in the regular army, joined the Canadian Provost Corps, a sort of civil defense organization. Members of the
CPC
were issued steel helmets and dark blue zipper suits of the type that Churchill had made popular. The officer in charge of Duddy’s neighborhood – tubby, middle-aged Benny Feinberg – was seldom without his helmet, his suit, or an enormous flashlight that he wore strapped to his belt. Feinberg’s zeal did not go down well on St. Urbain Street, and the
first time he marched past Moe’s Cigar Store the dangling flashlight inspired some rather obvious jokes. To these Feinberg was too dignified to make a reply, but when Moe observed, “No wonder we haven’t opened a second front yet. With Montgomery tied down in Libya and Feinberg looking after things here, who have they got left to take command?” Feinberg felt that he had been pushed too far.

“A bunch of slackers,” he said, “the whole lousy lot of you.”

The Warriors, to begin with, were on the side of the
CPC
to the man. Feinberg had assured them that in the event of an air raid they would all be evacuated to the mountains. Some of them, he said, might even be orphaned before the war was done, and this they took to be a promise. Feinberg and a few other
CPC
enthusiasts aside, the Warriors probably longed for the devastation of Montreal more than anyone. A direct hit, Feinberg warned them, might kill and maim “untold” hundreds of people. They were left with only one worry. The bombers might miss their chosen targets. Long into the night they once debated whether or not it would be sabotage – could a boy be hanged, for instance – if he painted a bull’s-eye on the roof of the Talmud Torah.

Then the tide, so to speak, turned. The Warriors discovered that behind their backs Feinberg had given instructions and issued a real first aid kit to a Y.M.H.A. club, and Duddy decided to fix him. His first chance came the night of the blackout. It was, to be sure, only a practice blackout, but real sirens were to sound the alert. The streets were to be cleared and all blinds were to be drawn. The
CPC
was to be out in force checking for offenders and, according to Feinberg, saboteurs and dirty spies.

Five minutes after the sirens wailed, leaving the city in darkness, the Warriors, faces smeared with mud, commando style, crept two by two down St. Urbain Street, spilling kerosene on the street here and there; and then they dispersed to the balconies and rooftops. After Feinberg and his men had passed, searching windows for telltale strips of yellow, Duddy slipped two fingers into his mouth and
whistled as loud as he could. All along the street clothespin guns came out and matches were slipped into place. Duddy counted to ten and whistled again. The guns were fired simultaneously. As the matches struck the pavement most of them ignited immediately and in an instant St. Urbain Street was ablaze with light. As it so happened an airplane, probably New York bound, was flying overhead at the time. Feinberg, they said, was the first to take cover, but there were those who insisted that Lance Corporal Lerner beat him to it. Others, like Shubin, did not dishonor the blue zipper suit. Shubin rushed quickly to the scene of the enemy action, and but for the fact that he had put on his gas mask in some haste – an impediment to movement and vision – he would have caught Duddy Kravitz anyway. As it was, all the Warriors escaped.

When the all-clear sounded several theories were hotly disputed at Moe’s Cigar Store. During the blackout
OPEN UP A SECOND FRONT NOW
stickers had been pasted on many windows and it was Debrofsky’s theory that the communists were responsible for the street fires too. Lyman didn’t agree. He believed that Adrien Arcand’s boys, the local fascist group, were responsible for the fires. Moe muttered something about the newly arrived refugee who had moved in around the corner and was rumored to have a short-wave radio set. But when the incident was mentioned in the
Gazette
the next morning it was clearly stated that a group of juvenile delinquents had been responsible for the outrage.

“Of course. What else do you want them to say?” Feinberg demanded when cornered. “You expect them to admit we got spies in Montreal?”

But a week later Feinberg stopped wearing his blue zipper suit and the St. Urbain Street section of the
CPC
could no longer be considered an effective fighting force.

D
UDDY KRAVITZ’S OTHER PAROCHIAL SCHOOL ACTIVITIES
were decidedly more commercial. He got his start in stamps, like so many other boys, by answering an advertisement for salesmen in Tip Top Comics. The company, one of many, sent you stamps on approval sheets to be sold. In payment, you got some free stamps, catalogues, and sometimes even a commission. Unlike the other boys, however, Duddy soon established two fascinating facts about the companies in question. Once you had sold successfully two or three times, making a prompt return of money to the company, you were sent a truly expensive kit of approvals to handle. The other fact was that a minor couldn’t be sued – certainly not by an American company. So, dealing with seven companies under a variety of pseudonyms, he eventually worked each one of them up to the truly expensive approval kit point, and then he was never heard from again.

Some of his stamp business profits Duddy invested in the comic book market when, during the war, American ones were hard to come by due to dollar restrictions. (Canadian comics, not even printed in color, were unreadable.) He bought, at twenty cents apiece, a considerable quantity of contraband American comics, and these he rented out for three cents a day until glue and Scotch tape would no longer hold them together. This led him into another and more questionable channel of distribution. One of Duddy’s comic book suppliers,
a Park Avenue newsstand proprietor named Barney, showed him one day a sixteen-page comic-book-like production titled
Dick Tracy’s Night Out
. The drawings, crude black and white copies of the original, were obviously the work of a local artist and printer. The books looked shoddy. In the very first frame, however, Dick Tracy, sporting an enormous erection with the words “drip, drip, drip” and an arrow pointing to it from underneath, looked ravenously at Tess Trueheart. Miss Trueheart was clad only in black panties. The adventure, begun there, continued for fifteen more action-packed pages, and the whole book sold for seventy-five cents retail. There many other volumes available in the same series:
Li’lAbner Gets Daisy Mae, Terry and the Dragon Lady, Blondie Plays Strip Poker, Gasoline Alley Gang Bang
, and more.

The Talmud Torah boys were getting older, American comic books were beginning to trickle into the city again, and so Duddy was attracted by this new line. After some haggling he agreed to order by the dozen if, in exchange, he was given exclusive rights to a territory that, after even more bargaining, included three Protestant schools, two parochials, the B’nai B’rith Youth House, a yeshiva, and at least four poolrooms and a bowling alley. This venture was the first of Duddy’s to end in disaster. Three weeks later, when the going was really good, Barney was picked up by the police and fined. Duddy, unfortunately, was caught with a large stock on hand. He took fright and threw them in the furnace.

Other projects, like the hockey stick sideline, were more profitable.

At the age of twelve Duddy discovered that smiling boys with autograph books could get in to hockey practices at the Forum. Getting in to see minor league teams like the Royals was a cinch, and if you were quick or smart enough to hide in the toilet after the Royals had left the ice you could also get to see the Canadiens practice, and those were the years of Lach, Blake, and the great Maurice Richard. While they were on the ice the players’ spare sticks, kept in a rack against the wall in a gangway leading into the passages out,
were guarded by a thirteen-year-old stick boy. Duddy guessed that these sticks, each with a star player’s name crayoned on it, would be treasured by many a fan. So he worked out a system. Getting another boy, usually A.D., to come along with him and talk to the stick boy, leading him gently away from the rack, Duddy would then emerge from under a seat, grab as many sticks as he could manage, and run like hell. The sticks netted him a tidy profit. But even though the stick boy was changed from time to time, making further forays possible, the business was a risky one. It was only seasonal too.

Duddy took his first regular job at the age of thirteen in the summer of 1945. He went to work in his Uncle Benjy’s dress factory for sixteen dollars a week, and there he sat at the end of a long table where twelve French-Canadian girls, wearing flowered housecoats over their dresses, sewed belts in the heat and dust. The belts were passed along to Duddy, who turned them right side out with a poker and dumped them in a cardboard carton. It was tedious work and Duddy took to reversing the black and red and orange belts in an altogether absentminded manner. Supporting the poker against his crotch, he’d roll the belts over it one by one. The girls began to make jokes about his technique, but Duddy did not understand at first what the fuss and giggles and slow burning looks were all about.

The girls, however, seemed agreeable enough. Funny-looking and thin mostly, that was true; one with a squint and three with crucifixes, five with black hair worn pompadour style and two with wedding rings and another, without a ring, who was pregnant. Gabrielle had a bad rumbling cough and when the one with the squint lowered to thread a needle you could see something of her bosom. She had the biggest breasts of the twelve. Her name was Theresa and there was always a Pepsi beside her machine. She usually consumed at least four by noon and as the day wore on big wet patches spread under her armpits and she began to smell bad. The girls punched in each morning at five to nine, and by nine
A.M
. they had all assumed their places by the machines: a tense crouch. At one minute past nine there
was a bell, a whir, the machines began and the girls, taking deep breaths, bent their heads lower over their work. One of them, Jacqueline, was a chain-smoker, and by ten-thirty her smock and everything around her were littered with ashes.

Around the time when Duddy began to understand the jokes about his method of rolling belts, he also noticed that only two men worked on the third floor. Malloy, who dusted coats on manikins at the far end of the floor, was an old man with a fierce tattoo on his chest. Herby, the sweeper, was a colored boy, and Duddy always watched him for the pink flash of his tongue and the palms of his hands. Other men – even Uncle Benjy himself – occasionally passed through the third floor. Manny Kaplan, the (as he put it) personnel manager and a nephew on the other side of the family, came in once in the morning and again in the afternoon. He swept in with a big frenzied smile and shouted, “Atta boy,” at the girls, “atta boy,” and leaning and looking he counted how many belts they still had to do, making a note of who was behind and who was absent. Much more popular was little Epstein, the silver-haired cutter who came once a day with chocolate cookies, a pound of Bing cherries maybe, or two dozen plums for the girls, always stopping to pinch or kiss them, rolling his eyes and saying, “Mn-mn” in a way that made the girls laugh and feel good.

Duddy noticed that there were only two other men on the floor and that when he supported the poker against his crotch Adele, the youngest girl at the table, watched him out of the corner of her eye. She was a nervous girl, too, forever getting up to go to the toilet. One hot afternoon, after Duddy had got up to let her pass, Theresa indicated with a jerk of her head that Duddy ought to follow her. He waited a moment, coughed, and excused himself. The other girls giggled when he went off.

Unfortunately for Duddy, his Uncle Benjy passed by a half hour later and saw that Adele and Duddy were gone and guessed where they were. Uncle Benjy had Duddy transferred to the cutting room.
Uncle Benjy was a wealthy man. A disappointed one too. His wife, Ida, went to Florida every winter. And when they were together for an important wedding or an old friend’s funeral or the summer they both had a lot to drink before going to bed.